4.2.1: Speculative Digital Humanities

One of my goals for the Opaque Online Publishing Platform (OOPP) was to practice a history of medicine as it might be told if medical historians applied contemporary standards of consent back onto historical subjects (0.1.5). This desire comes with its own rats’ nest of epistemic, ethical, and practical problems to which I have no perfect answer. I too have used nonconsensual materials for my own gain (2.4.3). The goal was never to make a wholly opaque dissertation, but instead to practice how a framework of the opaque, applied at different levels, may reveal and negotiate the implicit decisions researchers make regarding how they represent their research subjects and research objects in their arguments.

These ideas stem from two material issues from the project’s outset. First, while I am interested in the treatment of human remains, exigencies of the Covid-19 pandemic and a lack of institutional materials available made me pivot toward digitally available materials. Second, these digital artifacts were never owned by me nor by my institution. They are available in the public domain and on HathiTrust—an online consortium of libraries which make their collections digitally available for researchers—meaning that no matter what I do with them in this dissertation, they will remain extant in their digital form.

The OOPP, then, was developed with these limitations in mind: a practice of critical publishing, not archiving. My goal is to point to the very materials I depend on and question their presence in and reproduction from archives, libraries, and digital repositories. What does it mean to reproduce materials which depend on exploitative, colonial modes of conquest and extraction, which prioritized potential knowledge over human consent (4.1.3)? How can knowledge workers in the history of medicine reflect on their own collections’ historical exploitations? How can the history of medicine be reimagined from an opaque framework?

More than reflecting on the ethical issues regarding the reproduction of human specimens in public-facing work, the OOPP speculatively imagines how the history of medicine may be told. Speculative, here, refers to a historical counter practice to produce work in response to violences in and of the archive. The term has been used by Saidiya Hartman in response to chasms of silence in the archive regarding the lives and deaths of Black subjects.¹ My work builds more on a parallel approach developed by Krista Thompson who practices what she calls “speculative art history” in her work on the mostly forgotten Black minimalist and kinetic light art sculptor Tom Lloyd. Thompson writes,

Speculative art history entails the refraction of material and archival remains—which are often marked materially by absence, redaction, or disappearance—to highlight histories that might otherwise not come to visibility and the fabulation of art works, careers, or futures that could have been but never came into being. . . . Speculative art history bends the archives or the material remains to produce other ways of seeing, while highlighting factors—archival, disciplinary, social or political—that may hinder or mediate visibility. Refraction (which might be contrasted with reflection) also posits a different relation to knowledge, to the archive and object of study, that rejects the idea of transparency or reflexivity, the understanding (as delineated by Karen Barad) of representations as mirroring the things to which they refer. Speculative art history bends possibilities, paths, and futures.²

For Thompson, speculative art history enables an engagement with the art objects that were never completed in Lloyd’s career, and they produce a moment to reflect on the history of the artist had he had the resources to document and produce the work; “It offers a history of what might have been had the structures that shape visibility, opportunity, and history had offered Lloyd a platform.”³ Thompson’s historical method includes the manipulation of photographic evidence to represent the art as it might have been, with an eye toward how and why images are used in art history’s arguments.

I developed the OOPP to ponder how speculative approaches can address the archive as an open sore. I do not want medicine to continue to harm its research subjects, and I want medical historians, librarians, and archivists to have the tools available to them to make their critiques explicit, while also caring for the people who were harmed by medical research.

Much of my work in this dissertation attempts to bridge two medium specific research objects—wet tissue specimens versus digital reproductions of printed material—to think about how the digital can stand in for materials to which I never had access, and to treat these images in ways that could challenge and distort the value of historical wet tissue specimens in the process. My interest is not to erase the historical record. Instead, I call for the end of the current value system in the history of medicine which prioritizes medical objects over the lives, deaths, and afterlives of human subjects (0.1.4; 2.1.3). The early proposals for the OOPP were driven by this ethical intervention and speculative process.